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English Language and Literature

Cleveland State University

Theses/Dissertations

African American Studies

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Writing Through The Lower Frequencies: Interpreting The Unnaming And Naming Process Within Richard Wright's Native Son And Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Sarah M. Lacy Jan 2017

Writing Through The Lower Frequencies: Interpreting The Unnaming And Naming Process Within Richard Wright's Native Son And Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Sarah M. Lacy

ETD Archive

The search for identity within Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has long been analyzed, yet the fact that each protagonist’s search for self is brought to a point of crisis during an intimate interaction with a white woman has often been neglected. Here, I analyze each author’s strategic use of a nameless narrator by utilizing the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, arguing that the act of “literary unnaming” is used to critique the development of black American identity during the time of Jim Crow. The use of a nameless narrator is explored through …


Legacy Of Shame: A Psychoanalytic History Of Trauma In The Bluest Eye, Martina Louise Hayes Jan 2015

Legacy Of Shame: A Psychoanalytic History Of Trauma In The Bluest Eye, Martina Louise Hayes

ETD Archive

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s troubling short novel which focuses on the lives of a traumatized and disempowered African-American family and the community in which they live. The book openly discusses a variety of social taboos carried out by various members of a Black community in Lorain, Ohio. The most disturbing being the rape of a young Black girl, resulting in pregnancy by her father. Through the omniscient narration of a teenage girl, readers are thrown into the lives and thoughts of the adults and children within this community as they attempt to deal with these extraordinary situations as …